On August 19
, 1991, I was a thirteen year old kid playing in the yard behind our apartment building in the center of Moscow. Suddenly, I heard the distant sound of rumbling engines coming from the street. I looked over and saw tanks rolling past our building, in the direction of the Gorky Park. This wasn’t a holiday, and there was no parade scheduled as far as I knew, so I didn’t understand what was going on. I ran upstairs to tell my grandmother, and we watched the column of tanks pass by from our 4th story window.
In the next few hours, news of the Communists trying to stage a military take over of the newly elected democratic government spread all over the city. It seemed surreal, as most of the city looked and felt normal, except for some tanks parked in strategic places. One of these strategic spots was the Shabolovskaya TV/radio tower located about 5 minutes walking time from my building. I ran over there with a couple of friends, and soon we were climbing all over one of the two tanks parked next to the tower. The soldiers in the tank were 18 year old kids who didn’t really know what was going on any more than we did. They let us climb on the tanks and look inside in exchange for a few packs of cigarettes we got for them from the nearby kiosk (they weren’t allowed to leave the tank).
It just so happens that our family was scheduled to leave the country and fly to Los Angeles the next day. My parents worried that after having gone thru months of interviews, filing out documents, and finally getting the visa and plane tickets, we might not have been able to fly out because of these new developments. Noone really knew what was going on exactly, and how it was going to play out. The next night, on the way to the airport, we were stopped by the police, but after a few minutes, they let us go, and our family immigrated to the United States. Aside from the obvious reasons of leaving our home and going into the unknown, the flight was extremely nerve wrecking because we didn’t know what was happening back in Moscow. When we finally landed, we rushed to the television to see the standoff at the Russian White House play out.
David Remnick’s “Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire” is an incredible piece of journalistic work. The author succeeds in being both objective and passionate in his description of the fall of the communist empire from the beginning to its very last days described above. He describes and explains all the major political, social, and cultural events that took place during this period of time.
